"Q&A Special: Choreographer Slava Samodurov" by Ismene Brown
SS: "I think it is a fairly
subconcious art really. Maybe in future there will be laws and methods found to help people create".
IB: "Marie Rambert said in around 1910 I think that all dancers should have to learn to read and write dance notation, just as musicians learn from scores, so that there should always be a
pure text in itself".
SS: "Ballet is about quality, probably. Tradition, vocabulary, and appreciation and understanding of what is good and valuable and what is not. It is important for a company to have people around - whether s
ociety or fans - who can understand the difference between good and bad pirouettes, or good and bad productions of Swan Lake... Not all famous companies have good productions - sometimes they’re surprisingly bad but still the “quality” of dancing is there. Classical ballet doesn’t take liberties. I think here the Royal Ballet is an outstanding company and you can understand why it is so famous. The “qualities” here are far different and more varied than the Mariinsky’s, which is so much more homogeneous and comes from one school. But it’s also about the quality of
the audience that has grown up on that quality that is being offered".
IB: "Arlene Croce - you know they don’t like MacMillan’s work in America - who said about one of his pieces,
even if it was a bad ballet it was a bad ballet by a good mind. I think the good mind is the key. I can see there are ballets I don’t like, but I know they’re good of their kind - it’s just not the kind of mind I relate to".
